Enter the Mahdi

Where did the road to 9/11, and the current war against Islamist terrorism, begin? Conventional wisdom trots out the usual suspects: the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the 1978 Camp David Accords, the first Gulf War, Osama bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa against Jews and “Crusaders.” Some analysts go back to the Islamist Sayyid Qutb’s execution by Nasser’s regime in 1966, or the dissolution of the Ottoman caliphate after World War I.

Yaroslav Trofimov places the responsibility for al Qaeda and its bloody brood on a crucial “forgotten” event: the 1979 takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by a group convinced that the Mahdi, the “rightly-guided one” predicted in Islamic traditions to create a global caliphate, had come. For two weeks–November 20 through December 4, 1979–hundreds of these Mahdists held Saudi forces at bay in Islam’s holiest site, until the kingdom’s forces finally ended the occupation–but not the effects, which reverberate to this day.

Trofimov delineates both the transnational and domestic context of this revolt: the revolution in Iran, which stoked fears (justified, as it turned out) among Sunni leaders of minority -Shiite uprisings at home; the struggles between the Pan-Arab secular ideology of Nasser’s Egypt and Saudi Arabia’s Pan-Islamic counteragenda; the simmering resentments among tribal elements in the kingdom toward the ruling Saudi princes; and the increasingly obvious failure of the Saudi rulers to abide by their own Wahhabi Islam.

Into this combustible mix stepped Juhayman al-Utaybi, “a forty-three-year-old Bedouin preacher with magnetic black eyes, sensual lips, and shoulder-length hair that seamlessly blended into a curly black beard.” A most unlikely leader, he spent 18 years in the Saudi National Guard yet drove a water truck and never rose higher than corporal. But in the national guard he made important contacts, especially among the Ikhwan, or “Brothers”–the sons of Bedouin warriors whose fathers had been humbled by the triumphant Saudis. Al-Utaybi also became a devotee of the pragmatic Islamist cleric Abdul Aziz bin Baz at Medina’s Islamic University. Bin Baz was not afraid to criticize the Saudis for allowing cigarette and alcohol sales, and for allowing women to teach boys. But having been imprisoned in the past for his bluntness, bin Baz knew where to draw the line, one reason why he eventually became the chief mufti in the kingdom.

In 1978 al-Utaybi managed to publish, in Kuwait, his Rasa’il, or “epistles,” which excoriated Saudi Arabia for its lack of Islamic piety, reliance on American support, and failure to crack down on the heretical Shiites. The Saudis arrested a number of al-Utaybi’s supporters, and he went underground. But bin Baz intervened, getting the charges dismissed and saving al-Utaybi from imprisonment or worse.

This turned out to be a huge mistake, for one of his chapters dealt with Islamic eschatological (end of time) prognostications. Specifically, drawing on the relevant Islamic hadiths, or “traditions,” al-Utaybi discussed the coming of the Mahdi for whom he was searching. Eventually al-Utaybi decided the Mahdi was one Muhammad Abd Allah al-Qahtani, “sensitive and shy .  .  . given to dreamy silences and .  .  . passionate poetry in flowery classical Arabic.” Al-Qahtani also possessed the same first name as the Prophet, as well as “a broad forehead, a prominent nose, and a big red mark on his cheek”–fitting the Mahdi’s physical description. But al-Qahtani had to be convinced he was the Mahdi. And even among al-Utaybi’s supporters–who included Egyptians as well as Saudis–there were skeptics. But “Mahdi or not, for them this was an uprising against a puppet regime of American infidels, and Juhayman sounded charismatic and well-intentioned enough to succeed.”

The Saudi government missed this brewing rebellion, more focused on “far” enemies such as militantly Shiite Iran or the atheistic Soviet Union. So the Mahdist “near” enemy had no trouble, after a bit of bribery, smuggling weapons into Islam’s holiest edifice. On the morning of November 20, 1979, they gunned down guards, cowed thousands of worshippers into submission, placed snipers in minarets, and began broadcasting over loudspeakers that the Mahdi had come and that the bay’ah (loyalty oath) to the Saudis was henceforth dissolved, to be replaced by one to the Mahdi.

The government responded sluggishly because of bad intelligence, turf fighting between the Interior Ministry and the Saudi army, and “an avalanche of theological confusion” about whether the Mahdi actually had arrived. Within a few days bin Baz and the senior ulama (clerics) issued a fatwa rejecting that claim and authorizing the use of force within the mosque. But this theological cover came at a price: The ulama demanded, and got, a re-Islamization of Saudi society and, more ominously, a promise to put the kingdom’s wealth behind the global dissemination of Wahhabi Islam.

Saudi forces underestimated the Mahdists’ numbers and military experience and launched several disastrous attacks before managing to take back the mosque grounds. But most Mahdists retreated to the Qaboos, the basement level, where they had stockpiled ammunition and provisions. Unable to dislodge them, the kingdom reluctantly decided to ask for outside help. Jordan was ruled out because of possible Hashemite irredentism regarding Mecca and Medina. The CIA was discounted because Prince Turki, head of Saudi intelligence, “felt that the spy agency had been ’emasculated’ by strict congressional restrictions and that its operational capacity had been largely destroyed under the Carter administration.” (Also, the Saudis were angry that a Carter administration briefing had mentioned the occupation, blowing their press blackout.)

So the Saudis turned to the French. The Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie sent a team which advised attacking with a powerful tear gas, CB. By December 4 the Saudis had cleared the mosque, killing many (including the alleged Mahdi) and capturing 63, most of whom were publicly beheaded two months later.

Trofimov’s accounts of the violent anti-American riots in Pakistan and Libya at that time–by rent-a-mobs blaming the hapless Carter White House for the siege–suggest that the “Muslim street” was primed to kill Americans long before George W. Bush took office. And Trofimov is certainly correct that “Juhayman’s multinational venture, which blended for the first time the Saudi militants’ Wahhabi-inspired zeal and the Egyptian jihadis’ conspiratorial skills, was a precursor of al Qaeda itself.”

Yet while Trofimov’s account rectifies the discounting of al-Utaybi, it overcompensates by making his uprising the motivation for Osama bin Laden’s founding of al Qaeda, Mehmet Ali Agca’s attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, and even, indirectly, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that began on December 25, 1979, after the end of the siege (“the surprising weakness shown .  .  . by Saudi and Pakistani regimes .  .  . could only embolden the Kremlin”).

The greatest value of The Siege of Mecca is in documenting how Mahdism is not just a Shiite phenomenon but can erupt violently in a Sunni context. While Shiite Iran’s President Ahmadinejad merely pays lip service to the Mahdi’s coming, at least four Sunni Mahdis have actually declared themselves this year alone–in Indonesia, Gaza, India, and Bangladesh–while a violent Mahdist uprising in southern Iraq, encompassing both Sunnis and Shiites, was crushed in January 2007. Some Muslims have even claimed that Osama bin Laden might be the Mahdi.

The 1979 siege of Mecca might well have been a foretaste of what Mahdism may come.

Timothy R. Furnish is the author of Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden.